Sign Language Studies

Sign Language Studies 35 Letter Gaustad's review of Nim (SLS 30: 89-94) addresses two issues: he seeks to discredit Project Nim and so invalidate the conclusions I drew concerning an ape's grammatical competence ; he also argues for the validity of the Gardners' view of the'linguistic accpmplishments of their chimpanzees. In reply I will document some of his errors about Project Nim and show some of the weaknesses in his defense of the Gardners. According to Gaustad, I was "... admittedly biasedskeptical of the performance of other chimpanzees . . . " trained by the Gardners, Premack, and Rumbaugh. I then sought to confirm my biases, "'... first by conducting a project to teach sign language to a chimpanzee under impoverished conditions..." and then "by conducting several incomplete and inappropriate analyses of the chimpanzee's signing" (Gaustad, p. 93). He does not mention that my bias agreed with his when I started Project Nim. I sought to extend the Gardners' pioneering efforts and po to strengthen the claim that a chimpanzee could master some essential features of human language. My initial goals were to obtain a corpus of a chimpanzee's utterances and to document other evidence of a chimp's ability to create a sentence (e.g. Nim, p. 22). Gaustad also fails to mention my initially positive conclusions about an ape's capacity to learn a human language (Mm, p. 184). Instead, he simply dismisses my study by claiming, with no documentation, that Nim was taught to sign under impoverished conditions: Terrace seems to have tried to segregate Nim's sign language training from the rest of his life. In fact Terrace relates how he thwarted attempts to teach sign language to Nim at home" (SLS 30: 90). I know of no basis for that assertion either in Nim or in any other of the articles I have published about Project Nim. Nor can I understand how Gaustad's assertion jibes with either the title or the contents of Chapter 4 of Nim: "Nim's first nine months, his first six signs. " Nim's entire existence during his first nine months was at home. Gaustad portrays Nim's classroom as "purposely Spartan (no furniture) and small (8 feet square) . . . " and therefore deleterious to his learning signs. He also states that, as compared to "Washoe -and her successors Moja, Pili, Tatu, and Dar, " Nim was only taught to sign in his classroom (p. 90). In Nim and in the Science article I noted that Nim spent no more than 3-5 hours a day, five days a week, at his Columbia Letter classroom complex. That time included workouts in one of two "gyms, " walks around the campus, and trips to a nearby park. Nim was engaged in sign conversation with his teachers during all of his waking hours. His teachers kept records of his signing seven days a week, for at least 16 hours a day. Accordingly, no more than 15% of our data was obtained in Nim's classroom. Chapter 5 of Nim is replete with examples of the enriched atmosphere of Nim's classroom in his Columbia nursery school. His involvement in the activities his teachers prepared should be evident to anyone who looks at the many photographs in the book, In his discussion of my data, Gaustad contradicts himself in successive paragraphs. He introduces one paragraph by asserting that "An equally damning criticism of Terrace's statistical analysis is that all contextual information was excluded" (SLS 30: 92). The next paragraph begins, "Terrace did conduct a semantic analysis, relating context to Nim's utterances." The interested reader can find the statistical results of this semantic analysis in Nim (p. 191, Tab. 9). My reasons for concluding that this analysis is invalid-as well as those performed by the Gardners (1971) and by Patterson (1979)-can be found in Terrace et al. (1979: 896). To the extent that Gaustad comments about these conclusions , he doesn't come to grips with the unspontaneous nature of an ape's signs, one of the most important bases of distinguishing between a child's and an ape's use of language. In his only comment on this issue he claims, again without documentation, that...